Speakers:
Louis Bucciarelli, Ph.D. | Emeritus Professor of Engineering & Technology Studies | MIT
Donna Riley, Ph.D. | Associate Professor, Picker Engineering Program | Smith College
Dean Nieusma, Ph.D. | Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies | RPI
This plenary session will present and critique “modules” – proposed or already deployed in the classroom – for use in a “Liberal Studies in Engineering” program. The idea is to take exemplary, substantive content of the “traditional” undergraduate engineering program – the engineering sciences, the laboratory tests, the design projects – and subject this to study from the perspectives of the humanities, arts, and social sciences. The method is to build on the content and form of instruction in today’s engineering program but dramatically transform both content and form to achieve the goals of a liberal arts program – “critical thinking” is the key phrase in this regard – while preparing students inclined toward engineering with a solid basis in the fundamentals of the traditional engineering course of study. To do this, “fundamentals” must necessarily be redefined. An example of a module “Science and the Courts” gives an idea of how a laboratory experiment can be made the focus of liberal studies in a social science course.